Index

XFX did a good job designing HD 6850 Black Edition and while they ended up using a cooler that is pretty efficient, the fan noise isn’t something we liked. FurMark temperatures were at 67 degrees Celsius, but we shouldn’t forget we’re talking about a factory overclocked card here. The card’s core runs at 45MHz higher than reference (820MHz) and the memory is at 4400MHz (reference clock is 4000MHz).

Idle temperature is about 37°C, but the fan runs at about 41% RPM when idle making it a bit loud. In our case, the graphics card’s fan was much louder than the fan on EVGA 4-Way SLI motherboard’s chipset, so you can imagine what we’re talking about. Of course, you can regulate RPM from within Catalyst Overdrive.

All in all, the cooling is efficient but it could be a little quieter.